United Colors of Townsendia

While we’re all attracted to the bright, cheery, winter-shattering colors of blooming bulbs right now, we shouldn’t miss the subtle colors of buds and leaves, too, which are in a compelling place of ephemerally teetering on the mixed threshold of summer growing season and winter dormant wardrobes.

Townsendia hookeri (offered this year by Sunscapes Rare Plant Nursery, LINK hooray! It has been the longest lived Townsendia of all for me; my first plants are the ones pictured.)  

should not be assumed to be white:  

Warm Apricot

Tender Yellow 

and Cold Near-Lavander

Many great plants are reddish or even blood red in winter; it’s a special time when the leaves have both;

Like Rabiea cf. albipuncta ex Molteno, which will subsume its subtlety with garish dandelion like daisies soon.  I love how its spots phase from darker-than to lighter-than depending on where they are.

And Amsonia jonesii- Desert Bluestar- slow to establish but lives forever, in which raindrops magnify the very subtle cobalt blue suffusion tempered into the leaves and buds, a blue mustering for the real flowers soon.